Madonna says she offered her adopted baby’s biological father money to raise him – and that he refused.

“I offered that in court when I met him, and he didn’t want that,” she said in a “Today” show interview airing today and tomorrow. “I said ‘I would be happy to bring him back to your village and help you financially raise him,’ and he didn’t want that.”

She said she was baffled by his decision, adding that there were language problems and that she didn’t want to judge him.

“I think he truly felt in his heart of hearts that he [son David] would have a better life with me,” she said. “That was my sign that it was my responsibility to look after him.”

The Material Mom said a week ago she was so depressed over the frenzy surrounding her adoption of 13-month-old David Banda that she had second thoughts.

“I was in the depths of my depression and just feeling so sad about the state of the world and how negative everybody was. Whenever you’re in your dark moment, you think ‘I just can’t take it,’ ” she said.

But she certainly doesn’t regret her decision now. Asked if in hindsight she still would have gone to Malawi, Madonna said, “Today, I would say yes.”

Madonna and her husband, Guy Ritchie, were granted temporary custody of David for 18 months. She is a follower of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical belief system, and David has been spotted wearing a red Kabbalah string bracelet.

“I don’t think he was baptized, he’s too young to have been indoctrinated into any kind of belief system,” she told Meredith Vieira. “If David decides he wants to be a Christian, then so be it. But right now he’s got the red string, the Kabbalah.”

Madonna also defended the trendy spiritual movement.

“They say, ‘Oh, it’s a cult, or they say, ‘It’s Judaism,’ or whatever . . . Do people have a problem with that? Can I be Jewish, if I want?”